Effectiveness as a weapon cont.
Furthermore, only a few
Maxim machine guns would easily extinguish any enemy confrontation due to the crossfire method used to maximise the chance of enemies being killed and with it being used in conjunction with barbed wire, very few people would be left alive. Though there may be some benefits to the Maxim machine gun, there were also some disadvantages to these as well. One of these disadvantages was that it was prone to overheating very easily, of which it would render the machine guns inoperable for some time. As well as this, the machine gun took a long time to reload due to the lengthy belt of bullets and the time that it took to load it in the mechanisms. Finally the machine gun was incredibly heavy to lift and move around and usually required all the people in its crew of 3-6 to move it. Overall the Maxim machine gun was a highly effective weapon throughout World War 1 and had minor disadvantages, but was outweighed by the casualty rate that it made. |
The aftermath of the Somme due to the massacre from machine guns.
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